Dear Mr. M (3 page)

Which brings me straight to today's sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: What does a war do to a person of mediocre intelligence? Or perhaps: What would that same mediocre intelligence have done without that war?

I could help you out with some new material. The women and children have meanwhile been herded to the air-raid shelters. Nothing prevents me now from handing you the new material on a silver platter. That in doing so I consider you a military target is something you should take as a compliment.

The material, by the way, is perhaps not entirely new. It might be better to speak of old material seen from a fresh perspective.

I am going home now.

The first thing I'll do is read your book.

You're up unusually early this morning. Especially for a Saturday. The clock beside my bed said nine when I heard you in the bathroom. Judging from the sound of it, you have a stainless steel shower stall and an adjustable showerhead—you have a predilection for the powerful jet, from the sound of it; the noise it makes when you open the tap is, in any event, like an April downpour pounding on an oil drum.

I close my eyes and see you holding out one careful hand to test the water. By then you have probably already undressed, a pair of striped pajamas hangs neatly over the back of a chair. Then you step into the shower. The thrumming of water on the steel floor becomes less loud. All I hear now is the normal splash of water on a naked human body.

Generally speaking, though, you're more the kind for the tub. For endless soaking, I mean. With scents and bath oils, and afterward a lotion or a cream. Your wife who comes to bring you a glass of wine or port. Your wife who sits on the edge of the tub, lowers her hand into the water, and makes little waves with her fingers. You probably cover yourself with a thick layer of bubble bath—to keep her from thinking the wrong kind of thoughts. Thoughts about mortality, for instance. Or about copyrights passing automatically to the next of kin.

Do you own a toy boat? Or a duck? No, I don't suppose so. You wouldn't permit yourself such frivolity, even in the bath your mind keeps thinking about things that leave other people stumped. That's too bad. A missed opportunity. With mountains of bubble bath and a boat you could reenact the sinking of the
Titanic
: on that fatal night, the captain turns a deaf ear to all warnings about icebergs and the ship disappears, its stern sticking up at an almost ninety-degree angle, into the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

What I do judge you capable of is farting. A loud fart, with a rush of bubbles that roils up like thunder to burst through an iceberg of bubble bath. But I doubt that makes you laugh. I see an earnest expression. The earnest expression of a writer who takes everything about himself seriously, including his farts.

In any case, this morning you opted for the shower, a rare exception. I'm sure you have your reasons. Perhaps you're in a hurry, to be on time for an appointment. Maybe it has to do with your being home alone and unable to warn anyone should you become unwell. You wouldn't be the first writer to be found dead in the tub.

I think about you as the water pours over your body. Not for very long; it's not a particularly pretty thought. My impression is that older people tend to choose the shower in order not to have to look at their body. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. For you that's not a problem, apparently. Apparently you can stand that, the sight of a body whose folds and crinkles seem above all to be a foreshadowing, indicators of a near future when that body will no longer be around.

As far as I can tell from here, your wife never takes a bath. Even though she's the one who has nothing to be ashamed of. Before the mirror, under water, only half covered with a hastily wrapped towel, it doesn't matter, she can take pleasure in who she is. But she never stays in the shower for more than a couple of minutes.

Personally, I regret that. I'm not made of stone. I am a man. During those two minutes I've often thought about her, just as I'm thinking about you now. Hanging over that chair at such moments is no pair of pajamas, but a white towel or bathrobe. She herself is in the shower by now. She closes her eyes and raises her face to feel the jets of water. She welcomes the touch of water on her eyelids like a sunrise, the start of a new day. She shakes her head, briefly but vigorously. Drops of water fly from her wet hair. Somewhere in a corner of the shower stall or close to the bathroom window you can see a little rainbow.

The water pours down her neck. Don't worry, I won't go into any greater detail about the thoughts that come next. I won't defile her beauty; not out of respect for your feelings, but out of respect for her.

So the actual showering lasts barely two minutes. But after that she stays in the bathroom for a long time. To do things, I suspect. Sometimes I fantasize about just what those things might be. Sometimes I wonder whether you still fantasize about things like that on occasion, or whether they are just more annoying details to you.

This morning I'm having some doubts about that new material. The new material I could give you. Last night I read your book, hence the doubts. Yes, that's right, I read
Liberation Year
in one sitting. I am purposely avoiding terms such as “in one fell swoop” or “at a single stroke”—I simply started around seven in the evening and by midnight I was finished. It wasn't as though I couldn't put your book down, or, even worse, that I needed to know how it ended. No, it was something else. That same thing you sometimes have in restaurants: you've ordered the wrong dish, but because you're ashamed to leave too much behind on your plate, you go ahead and eat more than is good for you.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly. In fact, I've had the same sensation with all your books. You take a bite and start chewing, but it doesn't taste like much. It's hard to swallow. Odds and ends become stuck between your teeth. On the other hand, though, it's not really bad enough to summon the waiter and demand in a huff that the dish be brought back to the kitchen.

I think it's far more simple than that: even wolfing down a miserable meal adds to our stockpile of experiences. We've eaten absolutely everything on our plate. We feel our stomach bracing itself for a serious bout of indigestion. Perhaps we order a cup of coffee and something on the side to help our stomach out a bit.

And so, around midnight, after having put away
Liberation Year,
I turned on the TV for a few minutes. Bouncing from channel to channel, I finally arrived at National Geographic. I was in luck, the program that was starting was one I always enjoy.
Seconds from Disaster,
about aviation catastrophes. You see how the passengers—the unsuspecting passengers—place their luggage in the overhead compartments and fasten their seat belts.

Sometimes it starts earlier than that. During check-in. The passengers put their suitcases on the scales and are handed their boarding passes. They are looking forward to a well-deserved vacation or a reunion with distant relatives. But we, the viewers, know that they can forget all about that vacation and that family reunion. None of that is going to happen.

At the same moment, in another part of the airport, at Gate D14, a Sunny Air Boeing 737 is fueling up and receiving its last-minute inspection. The technicians discover “nothing unusual,” as they will later tell the members of the investigative committee. Most of the parts, broken into tens of thousands of little pieces and spread at great depths over an area of dozens of square miles, have now been recovered with the help of the most modern equipment. In a vacant hangar, investigative committee specialists set about putting the plane back together, using those tens of thousands of pieces of the puzzle. It takes months. When they are finished, the final product still looks more like a jigsaw puzzle than a plane. It will, in any case, never fly again. The only reason for the reassembly is to determine the cause of the disaster. Was it a technical defect, or was it human error? What does the black box tell us? Can we learn anything from the final conversations between the pilot and the air-traffic controllers?

“Left motor has failed…right motor has failed…we are going down to thirty thousand feet…”

Suddenly, the little dot on the radar screen in the control tower ceases to be a dot.

“Hello, Sunny Air 1622…? Do you read me, Flight 1622…??? Hello, Flight 1622?”

This all comes much later. The important thing is the beginning. In the beginning, everything is still in one piece. I usually think even further back in time. I think about the passengers. How they put on their socks and shoes that morning. How they brushed their teeth and then took the taxi or the train to the airport.

“Have we got everything? Do you have the tickets? What about the passports?”

Personally, I'm in favor of a black box that starts registering information much earlier. Not just the last half hour of conversation in the cockpit, but
everything.
The true extent of a disaster has a tendency to be tucked away in the details. In the note to the neighbor lady who has promised to feed the cat:
kitty chow only in the morning, in the evening half a can of cat food or fish, raw heart 1x weekly
. Barely twelve hours later, the hand that wrote those words has disintegrated at an altitude of thirty thousand feet. Or become lost amid the wreckage. That morning, that same hand tore a sheet from the roll of toilet paper, folded it three times and carefully wiped his or her backside. It's partly about the senselessness of it all, in hindsight. Looking back on it, he or she might as well have skipped that wiping, or at least not done it so carefully.

But let's stick with the hand. During the final hours of its existence, the hand—at an altitude of thirty thousand feet and moving at a speed of almost six hundred miles an hour—flipped through a magazine. The hand reached out and accepted a can of beer offered it by the stewardess, the fingertips registering that the can was, if not icy cold, at least cool enough. In a moment of inattention the hand stuck one finger in a nostril, but found nothing large or solid enough to worm out. The hand was run through a head of hair. The hand was placed on a denim-covered thigh—at that very moment, in the cockpit, the pilot looks over at his copilot. “Do you smell that?” he asks. Any number of little red lights blip on above their heads.

The aircraft banks sharply and quickly loses altitude. The cabin fills with smoke. At home the cat stretches out on its rug by the fire and pricks up its ears: that must be the neighbor lady with the kitty chow! Sometimes the plane explodes at high altitude, at other times the pilots succeed in putting it down, with two stalled engines, on a military airstrip on some coral atoll. A landing strip that is actually far too short for aircraft that size. That evening the cat lies in the neighbor lady's lap and purrs. If it's a nice neighbor lady, she will adopt it. It doesn't matter all that much to the cat, as long as someone keeps buying kitty chow and fish and heart.

Last night I read
Liberation Year
and this morning I think about you as you take a shower. I have hesitations, as I've already mentioned, about the new material. They say that with most writers everything is already fixed in place, that after a certain age no new experiences are added. You've said that yourself, in more than one interview. I can hear and see you saying it, most recently on that Sunday-afternoon culture program.

“After that age, there really aren't any new experiences to have,” you said—and the interviewer was feeling kindly disposed, he pretended it was the first time he'd heard it.

I don't hear the shower above my head now. You're drying yourself off, you'll shave, then you'll get dressed. With every air disaster, there's always that one passenger who arrives too late and misses his flight. That passenger, too, put on his socks and shoes that morning.
I could have been on that plane,
he thinks. His life goes on—that evening, he's able to simply put his socks in the wash.

What if you had felt drawn to another apartment back then, and not this one? I don't know, maybe you let your wife decide. It
is
a lovely street, after all: old trees, lots of shade, barely any traffic, almost no children playing outside. That last point is a bit of a shame for your daughter, you probably should have thought about that a bit more. But it's certainly the ideal street for a writer who believes that no new experiences are going to come along.

When you moved in, you didn't bother to introduce yourself personally to your new neighbors. No need to do that. That's what your wife is for.

“We're the new neighbors,” she said, and put out her hand.